


Love in Retrograde

by HidetheSilverware (alexa_dean)



Series: Life in a Glasshouse [1]
Category: Vampire Chronicles - Anne Rice
Genre: Belligerent Sexual Tension, I had to get Nabokov in there somehow, Interview With The Vampire - Freeform, L-squared, L2, Lestat was raised by wolves, Louis/Lestat are my Original OTP, Loustat, M/M, Memnoch never happened, Murderous vampire husbands, Not Actually Unrequited Love, Plain Lo in the morning, Queen of the Damned, Rue Royale era, Tale of the Body Thief - Freeform, The Vampire Lestat - Freeform, Unresolved Emotional Tension, VC Books 1-4, Vampire Chronicles, Vampires, anything after TotBT never happened, awful interpersonal relationship skills, not your YA novel, post-Tale of the Body Thief, the original dysfunctional relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-18
Updated: 2018-11-18
Packaged: 2019-08-25 07:49:20
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,524
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16657135
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alexa_dean/pseuds/HidetheSilverware
Summary: This is not about love. This is not love-making.





	Love in Retrograde

**Author's Note:**

> No money is made here and all characters belong to Mrs. Anne Rice. Also, the title of the series "Life in a Glasshouse" owes its name to the self-same song by Radiohead. 
> 
> NIN: Me, I'm not (lyrics by Trent Reznor)
> 
> Well, it's happening / Never planned on this  
> You've got something I need / Kind of dangerous  
> And I'm losing control / I'm not used to this  
> What you want from me / I'm not used to this  
> I can't shut it off / This thing I've begun  
> And it's hard to tell / Just where it's coming from  
> And it's hard to see / What I'm capable of  
> And it's hard to believe / Just what I've become
> 
> Chorus: Hey, can we stop? / Me, I'm not / Hey, can we stop / Me, I'm not / Hey, can we stop? / Me, I'm not / Hey, can we stop? / Me, I'm not
> 
> I can swallow it down / Keep it all inside  
> I define myself / By how well I hide  
> I feel it coming apart / Well, at least I tried  
> I can win this war / By knowing not to fight  
> If I take it all back / Someway, somehow  
> If I knew back then / What I know right now

 

Louis’ room has always been Louis’ room, even during our worst moments: our petty arguments and the knock-down, drag-out, furniture-smashing rows of the distant past. I never considered that Louis may never settle back in after the renovations. Or that the events of the Body Thief would continue to infuriate me in some vague, generalized way.

All the same, David, my beloved bronzed Brit, has long since taken up residence in the adjacent guest room. And much to my unforeseen delight, now and again, shares my bed. Nevertheless I find myself restless and unhappy. The sight of Louis’ and David’s leisurely camaraderie-- dark heads bowed over a chessboard, or eyes rapt on some insufferable French indie film -- would rile me up in the worst way, to a degree none of us quite expected.

As a consequence to my behavior, David spends more time _‘out’_ and Louis . . . Louis continues to come and go as he pleases. Our trip to Rio for _Carnaval_ indefinitely postponed until I extricate my head out of my ass, according to David. Can’t say it keeps me up at night.

On some level I know I should feel ashamed, that I am the root cause of my own misery, but I don’t! I don’t care. What I would like to know, more than anything, is how David has done it: this filthy trick with Louis that has turned my two-timing child into a fonder, less recalcitrant identical twin of himself full of gentle words and softer laughter. It can be none other than poetic justice that these two would get on as well as they do and leave me bereft in my callousness.

It’s said that scoundrels love honest men. And I certainly collect them, honest men, as one collects fine china or sexually transmitted diseases, without meaning to. Although I would be inclined to argue Louis is at heart a scoundrel in the guise of an honest man.

The westering sky is red-gold, star-scattered and sunless when I open the louvered shutters of Louis’ bedroom windows. Outside, the air is sweet with the smell of magnolia and jasmine, a mockingbird sings ruefully in the green darkness.

Never learning to withhold expectations where Louis is involved, I’m discomfited by the lack of personal effects. I had left the horizontal surfaces especially bare for him to fill: built-in bookshelves behind the blue velvet chaise lounge, the dark walnut bureau and matching wardrobe. I’m both curious and offended to find the furniture naked and unchanged.

Inside the armoire I find no new ensembles, aside from those tailored items I personally commissioned to Louis’ exact dimensions. I fiddle with them: trousers and jeans in varying shades of blue and black, marvel at the circumference of the waistband, the endless length of the inseam; the button-up shirts I had taken in at the sides to stress the consummately male shoulder-hip ratio of Louis’ otherwise underappreciated and ambiguously undernourished silhouette. Exquisite was he in the vests, waistcoats and cummerbunds of centuries past and could _still_ very well be if he hadn’t too-eagerly set the trend for the androgynous dishabille of modern-day garments. He is insufferable.

To mitigate my irritation with Louis’ persevering standoffishness post-Body Thief I have begun to think of him in disjointed, haphazard terms. Such as: _'black hair'_ , _'green eyes'_ , _'waifish'_ , _'cheekbones so high and sharp you’d split your lip kissing them'_ , versus conjuring behind my closed eyelids the exact replica of his waif-y, pouty ghost in riotous, vampiric technicolor.

Shaking my head at myself, I ease the armoire doors shut, focusing elsewhere. Like the bed. _Louis’_ bed. Designed by _me_ for the ungrateful bastard. I walk toward it: an Athenian Trireme of a four-poster truly-- sleek, powerful columns supporting an unpretentious tester with bespoke curtains fabricated to block out all UV light. Perfectly suited to the weakest and most dejected of Vampires. The platform base exhibits a self-lifting mattress for added _storage_ , or a cozy improvised coffin for the doggedly diffident. I thought of everything. _Literally_ everything. I could not have built a better, safer coven-house. Louis should be here. He should be _appreciative_.

I sigh loudly in self-deprecation, moved to distraction by Louis even in the vacuum of absence. My hands glance over the thick blue-velvet curtains before snapping them open. I startle, surprised to find the lazy devil in bed as though newly cast down from heaven, looking nothing short of everything I could ever want to entertain my basest, lewdest, wildest impulses.

Blindly, I take several steps away from his artlessly sprawling limbs and collapse onto the upholstered chaise in the corner. Like the dastardly fiend I am I do what I do best and _covet_. Louis would never comfortably permit me such open, calculating regard. He hates attention, hates being looked at. And I could not yet trust myself to touch and not crush.

Overall the whole situation struck me as indecent and divinely influenced, the feeling very much like the feeling I had when I first happened upon him in the corner of a seedy bar, playing his cards close to his vest in all ways not excluding reality.

In sleep, Louis’ beauty is positively nightmarish to behold. There is no gentlemanly manner to temper it, to soften the mortal blow to the soul, nothing to still my immortal hands and deviant mouth from possessing him utterly in the dark.

So, I trip the night lamps on; light pools over him then. Snags on the ink-spill hair webbed across crisp-white sheets, clings to the bee-stung curves of his strangely blushing mouth. Sweater, deep burgundy and bunched up under his arms, exposing the incurvation of his spine, the dimples demarking the precipitous twin swells of his perky ass. I want to press my thumbs there, follow the fissure of iliac crest with my tongue.

For a long time I remain motionless, recumbent in my lofty seat, feeling powerless in a way I could hardly stand. I wasn’t about to let my wayward child forget his place in our tenuous relationship so I set about staging myself by loosening my hair, unbuttoning my collar to expose a nipple or two, fluffing the pillows at my back, and crossing my bare feet at the ankles. I debate clearing my throat and settle on tossing a pillow at him.

I receive a small _“Mmmph,_ ” for my efforts.

Not to be outdone, I toss another one.

Harder.

Louis growls, gathering his arms around his head and draping a protective hand over his skull. The waistband of his trousers yawn open as he moves--no undergarments, per usual-- exposing the fulgurous, cheeky cleft of his ass to my view, stoking my wistful awe. I’m a sucker for ass cleavage, from the right person of course. But yes, _his_ most of all: the beauty of it rare in someone with such lithe musculature.

Not once did Louis consider to cast a baleful glance in my direction and I was looking quite debauched and vexedly mischievous in the sexiest fashion, all for _him_. True to my predator nature, favoring moving quarry over a motionless one I proceed to speak in an obnoxiously loud voice because I will not be dismissed in my own home:

  _“He is Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing half-inch shy of six-feet in one sock. He is Louis-Michel in slacks. He is Rene at school and Pointe du Lac on the dotted line, but in my arms he is always Louis.”_

“It’s too early for bootlegged Nabokov,” he grouses at me from a nest of hair and arms, judgmental to the last. Then, as if remembering himself adds: “Please, go away. All I need is one more hour. Give me one hour. Then you can have all my attention.”

Liar. I don’t humor him. “What do you know?” I ask with all the surreptitious aim of a viper. “How much has David told you? You and I haven’t discussed it yet. I feel like discussing it now.”

This time, Louis does rouse himself from his prone position to sit on his haunches, face obscured by a cascade of unruly hair of the blackest black.

“I’m sorry I stayed,” he mutters, battling a yawn with a pale, elegant hand; shifts the unraveling heft of his sweater over the indrawn ridges of his abdomen. Such an ethereal mantrap, my Louis; a truly villainous hothouse flower.

“Let’s not forget who the injured party is,” I remind him. “David isn’t here to protect you.”

He pinches the bridge of his nose, thinks better of it and instead uses the same hand to rake fingers through his hair solely to narrow his eyes at me, eroding my smugness.

“What do you _want_ from me, Lestat?”

“Your _submission_ ,” I answer truthfully, surprising us both. No one in the world could manage to look as graceful as Louis does crawling on both hands and knees over the California King to the opposite side to escape me.

“We’re not doing this tonight,” he says, like he’s the _boss of me;_ how annoying. “Now where did I leave my shoes . . . “

He is so good at leaving, my treacherous child, my plaintive paramour, my Louis. So good at closing himself off. I could read it in the set of his squared off shoulders, in the jut of his chin with its negligible cleft: don’t hear, don’t see. Don’t look back.

“What do you know? You can’t be too troubled by my actions if you spend time in my abode,” I insist, giving chase for its own sake. Following him out of the bedroom, through the hallway and into the parlour. Doomed as we both are to retrace our steps forever at Rue Royale. Phantoms locked together in endless animosity. Taking turns casting stones and terrorizing our mortal neighbors. What they must think of us, our goings-on? I grin to myself.

“Well? You have never spared me before. Go ahead then, tell me. Unload.”

I’m not _really_ looking for an answer. I could just as easily ask David. I want acknowledgment. From Louis, specifically; I want his fury and his jealousy. I want it transforming his eyes from that luminous green of a Luna moth to the richer, darker lacquer of leaves untouched by frost, heavy with sap.

Jealousy? It would be too much to hope for from Louis. He should be anguished. He should be assuming some guilt. There is no way he’s not considering it. I had plenty of reasons to work the Dark Trick on David. Love eclipsing the majority. David had become all things to me, after all, in Louis’ perpetual truancy. But the catalyst, the trigger, the focus of my incandescent rage is Louis-shaped.

What had he said to me, my bedeviled beauty? My diaphanous darling? As he’d pressed his cold, listless mouth to the side of my face? _'Could you make another after all that’s passed? Could you work the Dark Trick again? Look deep inside you for the truth as you told me to do. And when you know it, you needn’t tell it to me.'_

“You don’t really want me to tell you what I think of what you did to David,” Louis says in that soft, rich baritone that could charm the teeth from a snarling Rottweiler. He couldn’t bring himself to name it. What I did.

“Why did David come to you first,” I ask, assessing his posture, his modulated voice. I feel betrayed again. By David. By Louis.

When Louis hesitates, it’s to rummage through the contents of the top drawer of his desk, nay-- my desk, a reproduction. He is a guest here. A casual visitor. He doesn’t know I’ve taken his passport.

I’m foaming at the mouth for a reason to fight; a reason to curl my hands around the long, graceful column of his neck. But if I’m really honest, what I really want is a reason to touch him. I’m wretched with it; that need. I’m mocked by it. Offended that he isn’t overcome in the same way I’m overcome when we’re together.

How to describe it? Louis can be in the same room, in the same bed—lo, even in the circle of my very arms and remain as aloof and evanescent to me as a star. If I dare grip too hard or too fast I would find nothing but empty space, the echo of starlight arriving 200 years too late in the infinitely receding darkness.

“He needed guidance,” Louis offers, almost apologetically into the lingering shadows between us. “Instruction,” he amends. “Confidence mostly—“

“To kill?” I interrupt jealously, because Louis is side-stepping the issue like I’m not aware of what he’s doing. “You _hunted_ together? _Killed_ together?”

My hands itch at my sides and I imagine seizing him by the hair, dragging him, and bringing his face directly to mine. Because Louis should know by now that I am _not_ beyond pettiness when he is involved. That I am _exactly_ the devil he must believe me to be in order for him to have turned his back when I needed him most. No, it wasn’t his first offense against me, but it had taken the ground from under me like it was. And my own stupidity stings in the way blisters under a Gobi Desert sun are wont to do.

I don’t reach for him, my insolent love, but I do collide with him in the dark, bringing us up nose-to-nose, knees-to-knees. I feel his breath on my cheeks. I smell the blood in him. He must have killed just before dawn. I can see it in the pink dusk of his lips, the shimmering stain spreading over his cheeks in response to my proximity. He looks less the starved refugee and more Juilliard ingénue subsisting on instant coffee and sugary cereal to fuel grueling feats of physical endurance.

“What do you want me to say?” he asks breathlessly, his green eyes sliding down and to the right, uncertain. “He’d butchered his first kill. I helped him through the motions of the next.” It’s an excuse. I consider it. Then banish it.

“By _demonstrating_?” I’m not only a little jealous. I’m seething with it. I can feel it radiating from my body in gamma waves. I channel the energy, let it sweep the strident lucidity of the moment into the fog of lust. I could never destroy him. But I could hurt him.

His uncut, un-gathered hair is beautifully tousled. It gleams like animal pelt, rippling down over the breadth of his shoulders, approaching the inverted apex of his scapulae, longer than mine. When I touch it, it wends through my sun-browned fingers like spilled ink. I feel wicked looking at him, overwhelmed by desire. But I’m exhausted from it too-- this song and dance of ours, promises made and trampled on.

To call Louis a cocktease would imply he is aware of the devastation he leaves in his wake; that he is capable of experiencing humanity’s baser instincts. Louis is both inhuman and _inhumane_. If not for my occasional dalliances outside our non-intimacy, my proverbial balls would have burst. It wasn’t love at first sight between us. It was an inevitable head-on collision between two cars on a lonely stretch of highway and being too paralyzed to call for help.

 _'Let us come together,'_ he had said to me less than a decade ago before my ill-fated concert, _'let us talk together. Let us have each other in this century the way we never did in the past._ _And I do mean all of us.'_ Caught up in the moment, I never paused to think what he meant by _'all of us'._

How characteristically ambiguous of him. How positively _sadistic_. He let me paw at him, smiling at me. Let me kiss his open mouth, nip the ski-jump swell of his upper lip, touch the skin beneath his shirt, slick and soft as fallen petals. But no further. And maybe it had been the oncoming dawn to pull us apart too soon then. And afterward, my abduction by Akasha. And yes, I led myself to believe it was this transformation by her blood he abhorred which prevented us finally from surrendering to this _thing_ between us. But we had our chance in my brief interlude as a mortal man yet refuse me he did.

So here I am again, sucked in by the undertow of these furtive moments. Angry because never once did he give me reason to halt the burgeoning glimmer of long-lost hope from swelling under my skin like a blood blister. Never once did he say: _Ah Lestat, I love you dearly, more than anything, but not in_ that _way—_ because that would have been the merciful thing to do, the _humane_ thing and he was _NEITHER,_ in love.

“I think I will drain you now,” I say to him. “Force myself on you like I did David. This is my opportunity now that we’re alone. Marius too has left the city.” My voice fades in and out, like a wartime broadcast, languid and soft with defeat. “I’m done with your games, Louis. I’m sick unto _death_ of them. Sick of your limitless disloyalty.”

His breathing halts. “You won’t,” he says in the same way David had said _'yo_ _u don’t mean this_.' I push him back, until his thighs hit the edge of his desk behind him and he’s forced to sit and accommodate my hips between his knees. My gestures are languid, nothing of haste in me, as if desire has left me untroubled. My head falls almost sleepily against him, my mouth open to his throat. His biceps twitch beneath the circle of my hands, the vast discrepancy in strength between us monstrous. Unfair. Delicious.

“There are other ways,” I intimate, “of making you mine. Crueler. Baser. But in the absence of blood-sharing it’s the next best thing.”

His eyes are huge, nocturnal, when I draw back from him. He is both defiant and anxious. I take a backward step and he lurches forward involuntarily to fill the sudden void I created between us. He has no idea. None.

“It is, after all, only the pale shadow of killing.”

I study his face, so endlessly fascinating. It could launch a thousand ships _that_ face. Inspire endless wars. Reminded of poetry, I feel the malice in me take form: _‘As for your rage against Helen, your man-slaughtering Helen, the open wound in man’s side, as if every Greek corpse in Troy were her private handiwork. Let it go.’_

Helen was never so helpless. She was a Spartan Queen after all and looking at Louis with his disheveled mane, impeccable posture, and heartless, slitted eyes he appears the very spirit of the legendary beauty.

How indefinable, this quality, a sort of feline hauteur, something in the distance between the eyes and brows, the height of his cheekbones, the upward puff of his lip beneath the delicate tip of his nose. I nearly lost my life twice to that beauty. _Three_ times counting this last trespass. Armand sacrificed an entire coven to it. Claudia burned for choosing him over me.

But I am no Paris, no compulsive mortal. I am a God on Earth.

“This is beneath you,” he says, shoulder bumping mine as he attempts to brush past. I capture his right wrist with my left hand, elevate his closed fist between our heads.

“Now where do you think you are going,” I say, feigning cheer. “I’m not done with you. Not even close.”

Lifting my arm, I spin and shove him brusquely forward into the empty desktop, his face nearly hitting the chair back, opposite us. I grab the slumped fabric of his sweater and pull it apart, the threads pop until his back is completely exposed. Moonlight pours through the window lace and over us, our shadows flat beneath us. It’s a gorgeous back. The span of his shoulders tapering into that tiny waist, every muscle visible beneath his skin. I fit my thumbs right over the dimples in the small of it and bite the cusp of the first vertebra along his spine. It’s a tiny bite. A love bite. A taste. Only the tiniest taste of his blood.

“Tell me to stop,” I whisper, taunting him between tender sucks, dropping my hands around his waist and unfastening his slacks. Then, because it’s within my power, I tear the fabric in two, each leg separating at the seams and falling down to his ankles like slouchy socks.

“I might, you know. If you ask me nicely enough,” I continue. I’m not sure I can, but it wouldn’t be the first time I lie.

It’s not lost on me how easily this scene could have taken up an element of love-making: kisses to the back of his neck, my hands encircling his waist, hands splayed against the hard muscles of his abdomen until he would melt against me, rub the smooth mother-of-pearl cusp of his cheek against the side of my face, and he would whisper _take me, take me, take me_ into my greedy ear. I would almost prefer it if I were not so angry with him.

I push my clothed hips forward, right up against that tight, round ass of his. I’d worked the Dark Trick on him in the nick of time, before his body cannibalized the hypertrophic muscles there. What a shame that would have been.

“Say it. Tell me you don’t want me and have never wanted me and I’ll leave it here,” I press. “Tell me how much you hate me. Tell me to stop. Beg me. Because I will.”

I know what’s happening, his indwelling war with incredulity and outrage. He’s never done this as a vampire, never considered it. Not even with Armand. I’m sure of it suddenly. He doesn’t believe me, not really.

He jerks. And I slam him into the flat surface of the furniture with my hand around the back of his neck. “Stay still,” I say. The button is already out of the keyhole, my fly-piece falling away like repelling polarities. Heavy cock falling out and riding the cleft of his ass. He’s warm there, hotter, and the furled snag of the puckered surface luscious against my glans.

“If you don’t say no I will fuck you,” I reiterate into the hostile silence. “I know it serves no purpose, except a psychological one. Still, pleasure is pleasure however pale in comparison to the kill. The exchange of life for death and death for life.”

“I wouldn’t give you the pleasure,” comes the answer, a breathless rumble. Of course, Louis would never beg. It would be unbecoming and he is so full of the wrong sort of pride. It’s too much like old times—our game of chicken. This is the part where I would usually concede and part ways because I’m not _that_ much of a rancorous monster. And maybe I would never have in the past but I’m a different beast altogether now. Or more of one.

He has a hand white-knuckled on the corner of the desk and the other pinned against his hipbone, elbow bent. I want to sweep the hair away from his face. I am in awe of him. Slightly afraid of him and always have been on some level. I didn’t intend to deliver such a creature as Louis into the world.

“Have it your way then,” I mutter, my heart in my throat. Spit wells in my mouth and I drop it onto my cock and push. I used to watch him slumber most nights, early in our lives together. I’d taken a few liberties, languidly curious about what lay beneath the cloth. How naked and unguarded he was in sleep. How soft and wanton against my tongue, dream anxiety pinching his brows together under my tender ministrations.

This was not that.

I had broken out in a sweat; the slow inexorable slide into Louis’ body stripping away all sensibility to pain. When he sought to edge forward away from me I grabbed hold of his hip and shoulder and fucked him back against me with enough force the ricochet propelled him forward again. It’s violent, our fucking. I draw my teeth over his skin, wash the blood away with my tongue. He’s so quiet except for the _huh-huh-huh-huh_ each snap of my hips force from his lungs.

I had found my way inside him again, right under his skin. He’s so tight around me I could feel his heart beating like a hummingbird around my cock. His pulse and my pulse in tandem, our blood separated by only a thin lace of viscera. This was surprisingly good, more than it had any right to be. But I wanted more purchase. I hook his leg over my arm and lift his knee to rest on top of the desk.

 _“Fuck_.” I’m unsure who says it. Could have just as easily been me. He’s amazingly limber and resilient. The sight of his hole, forced to accommodate me, spread an irrefutable heat in my belly. I can’t remember ever wanting anyone so much.

This is not about love. This is not love-making. Its shape as yet undetermined, colored in by engulfing darkness. And the medium is all wrong. No, this _surrogate_ is fiercer, unpredictable, war-colored, and irrational. I believe I have something to prove. And Louis believes it’s his duty to repudiate my feelings.

“Tell me you’ve had enough,” I groan into his hair, hiking his knee higher. I’m grinding away at him, sac crushed against his perineum. It hurts but something like this is supposed to. This isn’t fun. “I’ll stop.”

His teeth snap shut on the next thrust. “Tell me no.” There will be no peak. No release for either of us but I chase after it like there could be. I’m hyper aware of the length of my teeth against my lip, the scent of blood rising from him, our joined parts, my sweat. I gathered his hair, sweeping it away, revealing his face: his tightly closed eyes, his shredded lower lip.

“You’re a fucking bastard,” he snarls, left eye snapping open and glaring at me sidelong. Louis does not swear often or easily so when he does it startles me always.

I smile. “Yes, I know.” I tug his hair, back us both away from the writing table. Guide our bodies to the ground. My intent circles invisibly around his arms and lock them to his sides. Now, I lie on my back with him sitting prettily in my lap, the remains of the sweater cling to his forearms, stretch over his ribcage, the gentle swell of his chest with its pink, pebbled nipples. Experimentally, I bounce him on my cock and he hisses, hands fisting over his knees as he shakes, unable to move without my direction.

Louis stands an inch shy of my height, less than two-thirds my mass, but the look he shoots in my direction reduces me to nothing, transubstantiates me into negative space.

“My beloved,” I say placatingly; meaning it but knowing full well my dejected darling would mistake it for sarcasm. “Kiss me.”

I move forward to lick his grimacing mouth, the wet, bloody corner of his eye. He’s as hard as I am. I can feel his cock shifting against my navel, the body remembering pleasure in spite of itself. My shameless, restless hands grip at his hips, search the rounds of his ass; fingertips touching the ring around my cock, where his body swallows mine.

“Baby,” I mutter, a mysterious change coming over me until I’m stretching out over the Oriental rug: willing him to hover over me, then releasing him to drop down upon my hips. I do this again and again until I’m able to dissemble that he’s riding me by his own volition.

 _Be_ _mine_ , I say with my body, _be_ _mine_. I rock into him, softly. No violence. My anger dissipating. His narrow hips circling, pitching forward and back. Wet strands of hair shift over his shadowed eyes, follow the sensual heaviness of his parted lips. I want to kiss him but I wouldn’t put it past him to bite my tongue off in a fit of rage.

I roll him under me, pinning him. Languorous with the rhythm of his heart, carving out a place for myself -- deeply, darkly, insidiously -- in the only appalling way left to us. _Be mine._ I’m ablaze with want, with hunger. _Be_ _mine_. My palm glides over his muscular thigh, lifting his knee to my waist, my fingertips glance along the diminutive bristles of hair on his shin, the knob of his ankle, my head dropping woefully into the crook of his neck. I mouth _let me love you_ against the skin there. I kiss the sharp angle of his jaw. _Please_ , I’m begging without words. _Be mine._

 _“Beautiful One,”_ I shiver, teeth resting on the keen throb of blood vessel there, postponing the bite. Until I don’t. It’s everything I ever wanted, this Eden-red, voluptuous abyss. I thumb his nipples, pulling three long, luxurious draughts of him into my moaning mouth, then worry the wound with my tongue, prompting the skin to heal lest he bleed over the Oriental rug. I’m panting. He’s panting: blinking, cheeks aflame, and hair awry, crushed beneath me.

Outside, I hear the gate latch creak open, and gather myself up to sit on my heels. It’s a momentary curiosity, fleeting. _David_ , was my first thought. _Fuck_ , my second. Books crash around my head, wood splinters, plaster shakes off the wall. For one quick second I panic, my lungs momentarily frozen and unable to expand. I’d been kicked, I realize. Incredulous. If I’d been in my right mind no one short of a few children of the millennia would have been able to budge me. But I was vulnerably blood drunk and tingling with it; relaxed and glowing.

At once, my gaze skips to my rebellious fledgling--still supine, propped now on his elbows glaring at me. Reflexively, my eyes devour him, appreciating the underside of his tensely stretched bare thigh, the polished muscular buttocks beyond, before coming to rest on his face.

On the whole, Louis’ lips will go unnoticed and underappreciated, given they appear as every vampire’s, the same homogeneous white as the rest of his skin. But when Louis is well-fed their deep rose color brings them into sharp focus.  Full, ripe in a manner that no matter how he smiles or laughs one might never see his eyeteeth. _This_ was not one of those times. They were deliberately pulled away in a snarl, leaving him absolutely demonic.

“Damn you to hell, Lestat,” he spits to my star-fished body. Louis does not scramble to his feet, does not attempt to cover his nudity. Simply rises like a Venus out of the foam of Chaos. “You entitled, self-serving prick! Your father did not beat you long and hard enough! Hell, Gabrielle should have joined in and saved the rest of us from ever meeting a scoundrel like you.”

I shrug off a few novels from my shoulders. Standing to meet him because I wasn’t about to take a tongue-lashing sitting down, adjusting my clothing because I also wasn’t about to take a beating with my dick swinging in the wind. The guilt was upon me and the conviction of it made me vulnerable. Indignant and furious as Louis is, I knew he’d have no such inhibitions.

“You want to know what I think: I curse the day I met you. I will gladly advise David to flee before you turn on him again like the rabid dog you are,” he shouts, shivering uncontrollably. Remembering himself he then pitches his voice into a hiss: “My only regret is that I didn’t kill you when I had the chance! I would have! I know that now. There’s your reason. _That_ is why I refused you.” Let it be known Louis is never one to balk at giving back exactly what he gets.

It was a strident, hateful scene and underneath it the sweet, smoky scent of his blood hung over everything. He was projecting such raw, pure energy I’d forgotten how it was like to see the old passion suffusing his beauty again, his naked skin glowing like phosphorous, a deeper darkness furling and unfurling around us. I was cowed by it and by David’s approaching footfalls on the stair.

I blinked and Louis was gone as though he never was. But I could still see the image of him burned into my retinas: his eyes ever-widening with cold anger before struggling with something else, akin to tears. I stood in front of scattered books and broken shelves of the built-in, a hand on the wall. Fury quelled and replaced with dread and sorrow.

“What in bloody hell happened?”

I look up to see David staring at me from the parlour entryway as though he walked into some stranger’s carriage house. I had no words really.

“Nothing,” I say. “Nothing at all.”

**Author's Note:**

> Before Kripke's Supernatural made its wicked way into my life there was Anne Rice Vampire Chronicles. Louis and Lestat were my very first OTP. Most of the 'spec' authors I loved went underground two decades ago. Whilst young adults now have Twilight, I had Interview with the Vampire to color my bizarre proclivities back in my tweens.
> 
> Authors I owe special homage to are first and foremost, Martha Cannon, with her spec "The Return" and Cesare with ["Secret History"](https://archiveofourown.org/works/16475534/chapters/38583872) as well as ["Trivia"](https://archiveofourown.org/works/8233847/chapters/18869675) co-authored by WCdarling.
> 
> Most recently, it is dollylux's latest fic [ "On Any Starless Night"](https://archiveofourown.org/works/16223396) that indirectly prompted this fic into being. I'd long forgotten how much I loved this pairing and she brought it all flooding back with shameless, glorious smut. I thought my writing days were over and now here I am--tenuously invigorated.
> 
> Comments and Kudos are life.


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